1 in 7 Black Men Are Kept From Voting, Study Finds

One in seven African American males is currently disenfranchised from voting as a result of a felony conviction, according to a new study released Wednesday by the Sentencing Project, a liberal Washington advocacy group.

About 510,000 black males are permanently disenfranchised because of laws in 13 states that strip convicted felons of the right to vote. Another 950,000 are temporarily ineligible to vote because of laws in other states--including California--that prohibit voting by persons in prison or on probation or parole, according to the study.

“While many of these individuals will regain their voting rights after completion of their sentence, the cumulative impact of such large numbers of persons being disenfranchised from the electoral process clearly dilutes the political power of the African American community,” said Marc Mauer, co-author of “Intended and Unintended Consequences: State Racial Disparities in Imprisonment.”

He added that one-third of the estimated 4.2 million felons who are disenfranchised are African American, who constitute only 12% of the U.S. population.

The disenfranchisement of such a large number of black males is “symbolically quite significant,” but its practical ramifications are unclear, said David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank that specializes in black issues.

Bositis said it was quite possible that a low percentage of the disenfranchised individuals were not registered voters, because most of them were low-income people, whose propensity to vote is not high.

Nonetheless, he said the figures are disturbing because “a lot of people feel the criminal justice process is just one more way to disenfranchise blacks,” many of whom did not get the right to vote until the 1960s.

The Sentencing Project has been doing research on the impact of the criminal justice system for a decade and gained widespread attention for its 1995 study reporting that one in three young African American males is under criminal justice supervision--either imprisonment, parole or probation.

Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree said the latest report should serve as a wake-up call.

“This new report by the Sentencing Project, like so many others they have issued in the past decade, is a persuasive indictment of the failure of our criminal justice policy,” Ogletree said. “The real issue is to think of ways to rehabilitate these men and that includes education, jobs and the right to vote.”

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), a veteran, liberal black congressman, has introduced legislation that would restore the franchise to any felon who has been released from prison.

“The right to vote is central to our democratic system of government,” Conyers said. “Our democracy is weakened when one sector of the population is blocked out of the voting process. . . . If we want [former] felons to become good citizens, we must give them rights as well as responsibilities, and there is no greater responsibility than voting.”

Several local African American leaders, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), Los Angeles Urban League President John Mack and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund regional counsel Constance Rice, said they support Conyers’ proposal.

In California, a convicted felon becomes eligible to vote after probation or parole has been completed, according to the secretary of state’s office.